WikiLeaks: How It Works

There is so much talk about the WikiLeaks reports published about the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan. You will find nothing fancy about its webpage. However, WikiLeaks would come off as a strategic platform for exposing sensitive information that not all people have access to. These are deemed classified information that is somehow humanized by WikiLeaks.

How exactly does WikiLeaks work?

Similar to other “wikis”, information is sent to the site electronically or by snail mail. Unlike Wikipedia, information is not published on WIkiLeaks immediately. Volunteer editors sift through these submissions to determine what can be published based on facts, relevance and importance of these information. Anyone can actually submit classified documents and information to WikiLeaks but only approved submissions are published. To a certain extent, contributors are protected from a legal and security standpoint since their identities are not made public.

Tracking down this controversial news organization may be very challenging. For one, their servers are scattered around countries that provide some extent of legal protection. Tracing their origins would take a tremendous amount of effort since they have encrypted data.

“We use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails — pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections,” said Julian Assange, the site’s founder and editor.

The site has been facing technical issues lately with the sudden surge of its popularity. WikiLeaks will likely survive these technical problems just as they were able to execute an effective information strategy.

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